Corporations have long ago realized the importance of effective and efficient communications to customers and among employees. As communications technology continues to evolve in conjunction with wired and wireless communications more companies are buying into systems that facilitate not only communications (e.g., message, email, . . . ) from many different locations but also from the myriad of different devices such as cell phones and portable computers. As companies become more technology dependent, reduced performance and/or failure in these systems can introduce a significant cost in both sales, resources, and lost time, just to name a few. Accordingly, more reliable systems (e.g., “high availability”) are desired to not only provide service at all times, but also to maintain the latest versions of information.
One technique for providing the latest up-to-date information for all users of a server or system is data replication among multiple similar systems, or to specifically-designated backup systems. Log shipping is a replication technique for maintaining a continuous database copy. A transaction log is a file that contains a record of the changes that were made to a database. All changes to the database are recorded in the transaction log files before the changes are written into the database files. If a database shuts down unexpectedly, unfinished transactions can be restored by replaying the transaction log files into the database.
By being able to maintain the latest version of information on another or alternative system, businesses can potentially provide high availability services to customers and enterprise systems. However, in order to support high availability services, methods are desired that provide fast and efficient data access for replication purposes and for reliable management of log files. In enterprise deployments, for example, there can be multiple communications and collaboration systems and databases that require information updates. Accordingly, it is desirable to employ means for improving and/or optimizing data lookups and replication services.